What a day. Had no sleep last night because my sleep cycle was out of order once again. Left around 9.30am anyway. When checking out, the manager asked for a ‘coin from your country’, found him a spare Euro in my backpack. After 20km of cycling I was so done that I’d have loved to stay somewhere. Instead I started nibbling on some dry noodles. Awesome. After 4 more kilometers I stopped at a restaurant (more on that below) and had the worst lunch I’ve had in India so far. But it was food and that helped me get back on track.
Reached Ankleshwara and had some teas and amazing lassis in the poshest hotel (more on that below) I’ve seen here so far. I decided to go another 9 or so kilometers to Bharuch. At some point two guys on a motorcycled slowed down next to me and started asking the usual questions, where from, where to, etc. Instead of naming some random city I said I’d be going to the next hotel. One of the guys said the next one would be 15km away. I got a bit worried about me actually managing to cycle that far and accidentally let out the F word. He seemed to have some pity with me and offered 10km. That sounded better and I wondered if I could get him down to 5 if I haggeled hard enough. Not 5 minutes after they’d left another motorcycle pulled over. Same questions, same answers. Only this time I got him down to 3km. It were actually 4 in the end, but I’m not mad at him for that little offset.
Got a room, took an autorickshaw to the city center of Bharuch. Found the contact lenses stuff I needed and chatted a bit with the guys in that optician studio shop thingie. Ended up buying myself new glasses, too. 24 Europe-bucks for a flexible frame and proper lenses, all done within roughly 1 hour. Hard to say no.
On hotels and hotels, and guesthouses and guesthouses. So far I got along quite well with the fact that hotels are not always hotels. Over here, a hotel can be either a hotel (rooms and all that) or a restaurant. It’s the same in Madagascar, by the way, and more than once did I find myself asking for a room in a restaurant. Now, so far the add-on ‘guesthouse’ was a pretty good indicator that this was actually a hotel in the ‘western’ sense of the word (please correct me if this kind of confusion happens elsewhere, too). Not anymore. A ‘hotel & guesthouse’ may also just be a restaurant.
